Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)

by James S.A. Corey

You could power a planet by hooking a turbine to her right now. That’s how much she’s spinning in this grave.”

“The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.”

IF LIFE TRANSCENDS DEATH, THEN I WILL SEEK FOR YOU THERE. IF NOT, THEN THERE TOO.

It turned out that as formidable as Gunny Draper was, she was even scarier when you let her train her own backup.

In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.”

“I call them ‘the Romans.’ The great empire that rose and fell in antiquity, and left their roads behind.”

and she laughed at his joke. Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.

Nothing died without becoming the foundation for what came after.

“Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.”

Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.

Don’t be a whiny little cunt, Avasarala said in his imagination. Hope in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first. Get to work.

Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.

Being reminded that they’d been building roads through a dragon’s mouth left him jumpy.

He used to say that when you went too far too fast, your soul took some time catching up to you.”